Posted
by
timothyon Friday March 22, 2013 @06:48PM
from the just-make-me-curse-less dept.

There have been video editing apps available for Linux for years, from ones meant to be friendly enough to compete on the UI front with iMovie (like the moribund Kino, last released in 2009, and the actively developed PiTiVi and Kdenlive) to editors that can apparently do nearly anything, provided the user is a thick-skinned genius — I'm thinking of Broadcast 2000/Cinelerra. Then there's VJ-tool-cum-non-linear editor LiVES, which balances a dense interface with real-time effects for using video as a performance tool, and can run on various flavors of UNIX, including Mac OS X. Dallas-based developer Jonathan Thomas has been working for the last few years on a Free (GPL3 or later), open-source editor called OpenShot, which aims for a happy medium of both usability and power. OpenShot is Linux-only, though, and Thomas is now trying to kickstart (as in, using a Kickstarter project) a cross-platform release for OS X and Windows, too. I've been tempted by dozens of KickStarter projects before, but this is the first one that I've actually pledged to support, and for what may sound like a backwards reason: I like the interface, and am impressed by the feature set, but OpenShot crashes on me a lot. (To be fair, this is mostly to blame on my hardware, none of which is really high-end enough by video-editing standards, or even middle-of-the-road. One day!) So while I like the idea of having a cross-platform, open-source video editor, I have no plans to migrate to Windows; I'm mostly interested in the promised features and stability improvements.

The new library is probably the most important thing, and that will be found in all three.

I think of having a cross-platform release as good advertising for the Linux verson; if the same software and files work on Linux as on Windows, the user is slightly less likely to be "stuck on Windows." (Or on OS X. With OS X, my fantasy is that the presence of iMovie will be a spur for keeping the interface friendly;))

I think this is going to be a major one. You can't aim at mass support and then ignore camera and format compatibility. And there is an absolute mess of formats.

It's among the major reasons (and there are a few) that I've seen people ditching Avid over the years. Now there's a software package as uptight and rigid over ideological design decisions as any OSS project you can find. Very different ideological hangups, but just as strictly enforced on the users, like it or not.

"There have been video editing apps available for Linux for years, from ones meant to be friendly enough to compete on the UI front with iMovie " none of them are useable.

I would pay for one that was like Sony Vegas, Final Cut or even Adobe Premiere from 5 years ago... NOTHING on linux is useable. I try and re-try every year and they all are either toys for editing short videos of your cat, or are buggy garbage that just do not work.